There is a lot to be said for the good old-fashioned police procedural of the sort that, in the days before cable, once dominated television. With its hard-R ways and highfalutin literary ambitions, cable gave us twisted-up complications, as in HBO's "The Wire" or FX's "The Shield," in which the heroes came clothed in the same shades of moral gray as the villains. The actual crime-solving seemed almost beside the point. NBC's "Chicago P.D.," which premieres Wednesday, is clearly an attempt to return to those simpler times, when a cop show was a cop show and not some Dickensian analysis of the changing social order. A time when crimes were...

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There is a lot to be said for the good old-fashioned police procedural of the sort that, in the days before cable, once dominated television.
With its hard-R ways and highfalutin literary ambitions, cable gave us twisted-up complications, as in HBO's...